by Aimee E. Liu
Morris towers over his father. For a moment I am confused, then stunned. The stained gray muslin padding of his gown. The sparse tufts of silvery hair. His hands, flung around Morris’s shoulders, are curled in reflexive fists, the skin leathered and spotted brown. As he pulls back, I see the wear on his face, creasing his forehead, tugging his mouth. His lips have shrunk around toothless gums. The flesh puddles beneath his eyes, and his once thick, dark eyebrows have turned wispy and white, as if eaten by moths.
The room has fallen silent around us. Paul studies me with the same wary disbelief as I examine him. There is a sadness so full and deep in his eyes that it tears at my heart. Neither of us moves. Then Morris says something. Paul’s friends begin to stir, and suddenly I’m conscious that everyone in the room knows exactly who I am. They are bowing and greeting me politely. Someone offers a bowl of tea.
Paul moves past Morris, stands before me. He smells of cinnamon and nicotine and the dampness buried in the layers of his clothing.
“I’m writing again,” I mumble, pull from my purse the small chrome Leica I bought especially for this journey. “And pictures. Cadlow sent me.”
The heavy skin around his grayed eyes softens. “You will write about China again.”
“Yes.”
“Look, missus,” one of the younger men in the group breaks in, speaking English. I follow his outstretched arm to a cluttered desk on which I recognize Paul’s old ink stone, his onyx seal with its carved lion head. “All friends of Liang Po-yu can see his American wife.”
I lift my eyes. On the wall behind the desk hangs a photograph—a smiling grandmotherly portrait that Jasmine had one of her studio friends take of me five years ago. She gave copies to her brothers and sister as Christmas presents. She sent one to her father. He took it with him when he fled Nanking, carried it home to Kuling, and Wuchang, kept it even through his month on the river and year after year of war.
My picture, hanging frameless on this spare cracked wall, flanked by misted mountain landscapes and a charcoal stele rubbing, is as jarring to me as my living presence must be to these men—to Paul. Yet it holds the place of honor.
3
It’s late and bitter cold out here in the hostel courtyard. The stars are like knife-cuts, the clouds, purple shadows moving west. I know I should go to bed, try to sleep, but I also know I can’t.
Nearly a week has passed since we arrived. The weather has cleared some. I’ve filled three notebooks and shot twenty rolls of film. Paul has shown Morris and me his offices in the Control Yüan, though there is little enough to see besides row upon row of desks and wall paint that peels in yellow scabs and dozens of boy and girl clerk-assistants whose parents are “in government” and whose sole function appears to be clock-watching. Later, as we stood overlooking the south bank, Paul pointed out the grounded European steamers that have been turned into fashionable restaurants for the Generalissimo’s intimates. Yesterday we walked past the half-ruined hospital where, he said, Dr. Mann is still memorialized. We visited the crater where Paul’s last house used to stand, then he hired a car to take us up to the cave where he hides during the spring and summer air bombardments. The caves are miles out of the city, dug deep into the faces of gray-green cliffs, crisscrossed with bamboo gates, and reachable only by hundreds of steps.
“In winter, this place seems grim and cold, but in summer when the city is so hot, we are surprisingly comfortable here.” Paul apologized when he realized he had lapsed into Mandarin.
Today, for the first time, he and I spent a few hours by ourselves. Morris had meetings all afternoon with his Red Cross sponsors, so after Paul finished at his office we walked over to a teahouse at the top of the Wang Lung Men steps. The inside room was crowded and deafeningly noisy, but we pushed through to the terrace outside, which we had to ourselves. Of course, it was overcast and very cold, but Paul, inside his customary padding, seemed hardly to notice. I tucked the collars of my gloves up under my coat sleeves and welcomed the arrival of tea.
Our table had a view of the Yangtze gorge and, beyond, the velvety green foothills and mountains. Paul pointed out the yellow hat-shaped villas scattered across the hilltops. “Many foreign widows still live in these houses. They do not understand.”
I winced at the familiar phrase. “Don’t understand what?”
“This war. History. We fight. We lose everything, but we go on. They do not belong here now.”
“Did they ever?”
He sipped his tea and squinted into the distance. “Sometime, there can be place for everyone. Not now.”
The readjustment of his face as he turned back to me was subtle and ambiguous. His eyes did not meet mine, and he did not speak. Below us, on the riverbanks, children were gathering for a procession. I could not see them over the edge of the cliff, but I could hear their voices, sharp and busy and painfully young amid all their cymbals and drums.
“And what about you, Paul?” I said. “In that letter—the one that took so long to reach me—you said everything here was gone for you, too. You asked to come back to America.”
He pulled his spectacles from a slit in his gown and tucked the stems behind his ears. They accentuated the owlishness of his face, compared to mine, which made me look like a schoolmarm. Through our respective glasses, we studied each other.
“Mei fatse” he said. “When you do not answer, I think, is fate. I lose everything. I go on.”
“But now? Now fate has brought me here.”
“Now much I have lost comes back to me. My work, my friends. My country.” He smiled. “My son and wife.”
There rose a clanging of instruments and the muffled stamp of cloth shoes as the children started climbing toward us, up the ancient stone steps. Suddenly Paul reached across the weathered table. Through the jersey of my gloves I felt the flatness of his bare fingertips as he took my hand. I glanced down and saw that his nails, like his skin, had thickened and browned with age, but he no longer gnawed them. As he gained the throat of my glove and gently encircled my wrist, a familiar, though almost forgotten sensation flowed up the inside of my arm. He turned my palm up and pushed back my sleeve, and for several seconds sat staring at the pale blue lines that once had been his weakness.
At length, he restored the glove and sleeve to their original position and drew his hand back across the table. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes the way he used to. “It is good you went to America.”
Our tea had gone cold. He signaled to a girl standing in the teahouse door to come refill our bowls. At the top of the stairs the parade dragon appeared, many yards of yellow satin pinching and stretching like a concertina, with red lantern eyes and a feathered headdress, at once ferocious and heartrendingly innocent. Child dancers and musicians completed the parade, followed by vendors selling toys—painted balls, wooden monkeys and bears.
Paul raised his arm and called to a girl with a long bamboo stick strung with drum-shaped lanterns. “Hsin-hsin,” he said. “For you, this one.”
He held up a small lamp made of wood and water-green oilpaper. Inside was suspended a porcelain boat filled with rapeseed oil. The gray day was just sufficiently dark that, when the girl lit the oil, the lamp sprang to life, for between the light and the translucent screen hung two moving rings of shadow figures. As Paul gently manipulated the strings, two parallel parades rotated: on top, a flotilla of warships and an army marching under the flag of the ancient Han Dynasty; below, a marriage cart trailing ribbons, the interlaced branches of two outstretched trees, a cormorant and his fisherman’s boat, and a steaming train with one silhouetted figure peering from each compartment.
The ring of peace and the ring of war revolved at different speeds. Periodically, they reversed course and passed in opposing directions. They were lit by the same light, spun within reach of each other, but though their shadows occasionally touched, they remained separate and distinct. This stole nothing from the lantern’s beauty. In fact, it was its magic.
CHRONOLO
GY
Date
Event
1840–42
• Opium War. Great Britain forces China to accept foreign trade, particularly trade in opium.
1853–64
• Taiping Rebellion against Manchu rule, crushed by Manchu forces with help from British Army regulars and European and American mercenaries.
1866
• Sun Yat-sen (founder of Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party, 1912) born in Kwangtung Province.
1882
• Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibits entry of Chinese laborers into U.S.
1885
• Armed white miners attack hundreds of Chinese laborers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killing 28 Chinese, wounding 15.
1894–95
• Sino-Japanese War. China loses Taiwan to Japan, recognizes Korea’s independence.
1895
• Sun Yat-sen’s first plan for rebellion against the Manchus is uncovered. Sun flees China.
1900
• The Boxer Rebellion. Secret society of the Boxers leads a Chinese revolt against the Western Powers, and is suppressed. Allied reprisals include mass executions, crushing indemnities, new concessions, legalized foreign garrisons between Tientsin and Peking.
• Sun Yat-sen secretly returns from Europe to China, plots with revolutionary students under T’ang Ts’ai-ch’ang to seize Hankow from Manchu control. The plot is exposed. Sun Yat-sen escapes to Japan. T’ang Ts’ai-ch’ang is executed by Chang Chih-tung.
1903
• Chinese student activists at New Year’s celebration in Tokyo publicly call for overthrow of the Manchus.
1904
• Russo-Japanese War begins.
• Chinese Freemasons in San Francisco give Sun Yat-sen editorial control over their newspaper, Ta T’ung Jih Pao.
• Sun Yat-sen forms revolutionary Alliance Society in Tokyo (name changed in 1912 to Kuomintang).
• Traditional Chinese examination system is abolished.
1906
• Great Earthquake and Fire in San Francisco.
1908
• Dowager Empress and the Emperor die.
1909
• Sun Yat-sen tours U.S. to raise funds for revolution.
1911
• Oct. 10, Chinese Revolution breaks out in Wuchang. Manchu troops mutiny.
• Dec. 25, Sun Yat-sen arrives in Shanghai.
1912
• Jan. I, provisional assembly of Nanking elects Sun Yat-sen President of Republic of China.
• Feb. 12, boy-emperor P’u-i formally abdicates.
• Sun Yat-sen resigns in favor of Yüan Shih-k’ai, as President of Republic of China. Sun becomes Director of Railways.
1913
• March 20, Kuomintang leader Sung Chiao-jen assassinated in Shanghai.
• Summer, Second (Republican) Revolution fails.
1914
• European Great War (WWI) begins.
• Japan seizes Tsingtao, German colony in China.
1915
• Jan. 18, Japan presents the Twenty-one Demands to China.
• Dec. 12, Yüan Shih-k’ai attempts to reestablish monarchy, with himself as Emperor.
1916
• Sun Yat-sen incites the southern provinces to form a revolutionary government at Canton.
• March 22, Yüan Shih-k’ai cancels his monarchy.
• June 6, Yüan Shih-k’ai dies. Vice President Li Yüan-hung becomes President.
• Warlord Era begins.
1917
• August, Northern government in Peking and Generalissimo Sun Yat-sen, heading a separate provisional regime in Canton, declare war on Germany. 175,000 laborers sent overseas to help Allies.
1918
• Nov. 11, World War I ends.
1919
• April, Versailles treaty awards Germany’s China concessions to Japan.
• May Fourth Movement. Students riot, protesting Versailles treaty.
1921
• Chinese Communist Party is founded in Shanghai.
1923
• Oct., Mikhail Borodin arrives in Canton.
1924
• Kuomintang is recognized with Russian assistance. Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party form their first united front.
• Chiang Kai-shek is appointed commandant of Whampao Military Academy.
• Sun Yat-sen plans Northern Expedition for reunification of China.
1925
• March, Sun Yat-sen dies.
1926
• Northern Expedition led by Chiang Kai-shek is launched against northern warlords.
• Kuomintang, led by left wing and Mikhail Borodin, chooses Hankow as its capital.
• Dec. 5–8, Chiang Kai-shek and Mikhail Borodin attempt truce through meetings in Kuling.
1927
• British Settlements in Hankow and Kiukiang are overrun by Chinese demonstrators and are to be renditioned to China.
• Nanking Incident. Foreign residents are killed and molested by Chinese troops in Nanking.
• April 12–13, Chiang Kai-shek launches White Terror massacre of left wing in Shanghai and southern provinces, killing thousands.
• July, Mikhail Borodin flees China for Soviet Union.
1928
• June, Peking falls to the Nationalists.
• October, Chiang Kai-shek establishes Nationalist capital in Nanking.
1931
• Sept., Japan invades Manchuria.
1932
• Jan., Japan attacks Shanghai.
1937–40
• Japanese armies overrun western and central China.
• Nationalists retreat west, establish wartime capital in Chungking.
1939
• March, Japanese begin aerial bombing of Chungking.
• World War II begins in Europe.
1941
• Dec. 7, Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
• U.S. enters the war, siding with Allies—and China.
1945
• Aug. 6, 9, U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Aug. 14, Japan surrenders.
• Chiang reopens war against Communists.
1946–49
• Second Civil War, called by the Communists the War of Liberation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks, first of all, to my father, Maurice Liu, whose memories of people and places and unerring recall of history helped to fill in so many blanks. Also to my uncle and aunts, Herb and Aileen Luis and Loti Hipple, and my mother, Jane Liu, for backing up Dad’s memories with their own stories and research, and to my cousin Caroline Robertson Brown for the many tales, photographs, and documents she relayed from her mother’s “archives.” I owe a tremendous debt to the late Blossom Luis Robertson, who sadly died before completing her own China novel, but who opened the way for this book.
From the first, my editor, Jamie Raab, and my agent, Richard Pine, have provided the tough and gentle criticism for which I am ever grateful. I also want to thank Maureen Egen, Liv Blumer, and Nancy Wiese for your unflagging enthusiasm and hard work; Arthur Pine and Lori Andiman for your good humor and diligence; John Aherne for relaying and converting revision after revision; Eric Edson, Cai Emmons, Hugh Gross, Arnold Margolin for steering me through the first perilous chapters; and Linda Ashour for her astute advice in the final hours.
My translators, Adam Schorr, Shu Min Li, and Joy Shaw, not only provided expert advice regarding Chinese culture, history, and language, but by enabling me to read Liu Ch’eng-yü’s memoirs and poetry, they introduced me to a man of incomparable humor, intellect, courage, and humanity—who also happened to be my grandfather.
Thanks to Neil Thompson and Suzanne Dewberry for their cheerful assistance in turning up family immigration and citizenship documents; to Denice Wheeler for acquainting me with Evanston’s history as “marriage capital” of the Old West; to Esther Katz for her last-minute briefing on Margaret Sanger; and to Thomas
Chinn for demystifying San Francisco’s early Chinatown, its politics and people.
Finally, for granting me the time, patience, insight, and love that have made it possible to write and to keep on writing, I thank my “men,” Graham, Daniel, and especially Marty, with all my heart.
Photo by Charles Drucker
Aimee Liu’s work includes the novels Flash House, Face, and Glorious Boy (to be published in 2020), as well as the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a past president of PEN USA and a current member of the faculty of Goddard College’s MFA program in creative writing at Port Townsend, WA. She lives in Los Angeles.